NewbieDM Tutorial – Counters, Tokens, or Pogs

Welcome to what is by far the most popular post on NewbieDM. More than 20000 (!) of you have made your own tokens for use in your games, and I’m thankful that I’ve been able to help DM’s out there run a better D&D game. I invite you to take a look around the site, there’s tons of good stuff here for DM’s, both new and old alike. I’m also proud and honored that NewbieDM was selected as one of Wired Magazine’s Top 5 Greatest RPG Blogs, and again, I invite you to take a look around the rest of the posts on the site. Happy Gaming!

I’m going to make my first attempt at making a tutorial here, and try to show you how I make my D&D tokens. It’s not as simple as cutting out little papers or cardstock, I like to make them durable and permanent.

Presenting…. NewbieDM’s Kick Ass Token Makin’ Tutorial!!!

Okay, this tutorial assumes a few things…

That you own a copy of, and have some experience using Photoshop. If not download Gimp, an open source equivalent.

That you also own a copy of the TokenTool software, a free token making utility.

That you have an Elmer’s Glue Extra Strength Glue Stick. I bought it at Office Depot.

If you plan to use Gimp, try to follow along. I don’t know Gimp at all, I’ve never used it. Also, if you do use Photoshop, keep in mind that I am not an expert on it. I know just enough to do what I have to do and that’s it. I may be doing something that you know can be done differently and faster, then by all means do it.

Okay, the tutorial then.

Open Tokentool and drag a picture unto it. I find pictures on the web, or on pdf’s. The higher the resolution, the better. I searched for a hi-res picture of Gandalf on Google.

Make your width and height 256, and select a frame/border for the token. Once you do that, you can adjust the zoom level and in the upper right corner, you’ll see what the final token looks like.

Open photoshop, and grab the token image on the top right of Tokentool, and drag it unto photshop, where it will open as a .png file called .token.drag. Then go ahead and create a new CMYK document. From what I understand CMYK will match what color is on the screen to the paper better than RGB. Right, sounds like Chinese, I know. Anyways, I print on 8×11 photopaper, so that’s the size I pick, “Letter”.

It is very important that your resolution matches the size of the token height/width you picked in Tokentool. If you picked 256 then your photoshop resolution has to match. I usually go with 200, don’t ask me why… As long as the resolution on Tokentool matches the resolution of Photoshop, you’ll be fine.

Once your new document is created, go ahead and drag the .token.drag. file unto it. You’ll see that it keeps its 1″ size, and I’m assuming you have the ruler visible in photoshop. If not, go to View>Rulers to make it visible. Position the token on the document at about 1″ off the top and the left margin, to allow for printing margins. And now, we will duplicate it, so the token has two sides, as we’ll make the flip side of the token it’s “bloodied” equivalent. Duplicating it is easy:

Hold down the ALT key, as you grab it with the select tool, and drag it to the side. You’ll actually create and drag a duplicate. It’s that simple. That duplicate will become layer 2 on your document. Position it where you want it.

So now that you have two versions of Gandalf there, we need to bloody him up. I flip the tokens at the table when a PC or monster is bloodied. Here is a full size .png of the blood file. Save it, and open it in Photoshop.

Okay, so now you’ve got the document with the 2 Gandalf’s, the blood, and the original token.drag. of Gandalf all open. You can go ahead and close token.drag. No need to save it either.

Go ahead and grab the blood, and drag it over the second Gandalf over to the main document. Photoshop will create a new layer, and have it highlighted on the layers box. The blood should be a little larger than the token, so we have to adjust the size. (A note on this: You don’t really need to adjust the size of the blood if you don’t want to, when you punch the token out with the 1″ hole punch it won’t really make a difference. I resize it in order to keep the blood nicely within the frame I selected in Tokentool.) Go to EDIT>TRANSFORM>SCALE and there it will let you adjust the blood size. Hit the select tool and it will ask you to confirm the transformation.

Okay, now the blood seems to be a little too dark, and Gandalf is barely visible. Let’s make the blood more transparent. Right click Layer 3, the blood layer, and go to “Blending Options.” Once that window open up, find the slider that says “Fill Opacity” and drag it to about 60. That should look better. See this image below:

See the difference? Next, let’s go ahead and label Gandalf by name. With minis, it is hard to keep track of what mini is what, and a fight with 10 enemies can get confusing for a DM trying to keep track of what mini represents what guy on the battle map. Not with tokens though. Just add text and numbers, and it’s very simple to run fast paced combat. Goblin 1, Goblin 2, etc…

Okay, click on the text tool, and write “Gandalf” over on the left token. Find a font that’s easy to read, as these tokens are only 1″. If you want, you can curve the text to match the curve of the token. When you type, a T with a curve button will be available on the top bar of photoshop. That allows you to select a curve for your text. You select the text, click that “T” button and pick a type of slant or curve. Position and size the text so it fits over your token.

Then just like we did earlier with Gandalf, grab it with the select tool while holding ALT, and duplicate it as we drag it over to bloody Gandalf. Notice the text is a different color in the second pic, and it has an outline? You can select your text color while you have the text tool active, and the outline is called a stroke. You would right click your text on the “layers” window and pick Blending Options, just like we did for the blood transparency. Pick the checkbox at the bottom that says “Stroke”, and select a color. It defaults to red, I usually do white text with black stroke. Pick a stroke width, I usually go with 1.

Now, you’re not going to waste an entire paper on two tokens, so repeat the steps above and fill the paper with monsters, labeling them as you go. Keep track of your layers, as they can get confusing. Rename them in the layer window as you work and merge down layers you have finished. It’s very easy for the blood layer to sometimes end up over the text layer, and you don’t want that, you want the text always on top.

This thing with the layers can be the most confusing part. If you are not too familiar with photoshop go and find a basic tutorial to help you with layers.

You like my Homer Simpson handwriting? So does my wife. Okay, so you now have a document full of tokens… Let’s get them to the game table! Print them out at the highest quality your printer allows, using the best paper. I use glossy photo paper. It simply looks the best.

Once it prints out, check it out. You should have a 1″ pair of Gandalf tokens. Now it’s time to use your supplies. Use your 1″ hole punch to punch these suckers out, using the window on the punch to align them perfectly. You may need to cut them into strips from the printout, so they can fit in the hole punch.

Next, apply your glue directly unto the metal washer and stick and stick Gandalf on there. Then just flip him over and apply more glue, and stick the bloody Gandalf on the other side, and there’s your token!

If you decide to use these, you’ll see that it leads to faster game play. Everyone knows who’s who at the table, monsters have numbers to make running them simpler, and players can custom design their own look. I gave my friend elf ears in photoshop and he uses his own picture.

One last thing. When I first started making these, I made the mistake of making minions like this as well. Minions never get bloody though, so I was wasting time and ink. What I do with minions is diferent. I print them out on cardstock, and stick them on 1″ round wooden disks. Michael’s Craft store has a bag of 52 alphabet circles for $2. They also come with an adhesive built in. Just peel the backing and stick your monster. They work perfectly for minions, since it’s possible to have so many of them at the table. They are a lot lighter than metal washers as well…

I’ll probably try this when I go to the US for christmas.
Since I don’t think I can get the same supplies here (damn metric system!), I would have to buy the materials with me home, so I’d like to get enough the first time. Hence, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be possible to use the alphabet circles for all the tokens? (or the other way around, but the alphabet circles seem cheaper).

#1 Scale – wouldn’t it be best to scale the image in Tokentool instead of the GIMP.

#2 Bloodied – It looks to me that you’re making things hard for yourself, wrt the “blooded” state. One option would be using different outlines in the Tokentool program. Another easy way would be to adjust the colors of the image to get a red tint. Either way would require a lot less tweaking of the image.

#3 Cost – except for mass, wouldn’t it be cheaper to always use the wooden tolkens instead of the washers?

Buying washers in the bag is too expensive. Buy a box of them at Ace Hardware, it won’t be a whole lot more per unit than the wooden circles, and I bet you can buy a larger bulk of fender washers than you can the wooden circles!

Also, if you want to print them in color without having water-based inks that will run you should consider just laying them out in 3×5″ sheets and getting them printed at your local Walgreens or CVS. It’s really cheap and the glossy photo paper holds up extremely well.

This is a great idea. We have done something similar but with more expensive wood discs (they hold up better than the alphabet ones – washers are a great alternative though). You can get larger wood discs as well.

Rather than printing on glossy photo paper, I print on cardstock and laminate the pictures myself with clear packing tape (carefully apply the tape to both sides of the paper and cut around your counter) so that they are thicker, durable and somewhat water resistant. Then we use peel and stick removable tabs (found in the scrapbooking section of the craft store) to stick the laminated images to the wooden discs so we can reuse the wooden discs; thus, we don’t have to make counters for everything to keep forever and save some money (and they store smaller completely flat).

Helpful hints for anyone using GIMP, I’m using thie technique without even the Tokenizer software. Here’s what I’ve been doing:

1. Find a suitable image on the web. Especially useful is perusing Wizard’s mini gallery for the exact creature you want.
2. Copy the image to your clipboard (in Firefox, it’s just right-click – Copy Image)
3. In GIMP, File – Acquire – Paste as New.
4. Select the circle selector tool, and do the following:
a. Check off “Fixed” aspect ratio
b. Set the aspect ratio to 1:1 (the default)
c. Switch the “Size” boxes from px. to in.
5. Drag a 1″ x 1″ circle by watching the Size boxes, then drag it to an appropriate location.
6. I usually resize the image to give me space at the top for the caption:
a. Image – Canvas Size, and iIncrease width & height
b. Click the “Center” button then the “Resize” button
c. Image – Flatten Image to fill in the background
7. Once your circle is where you want it:
a. Image – Crop to Selection
b. Select – Invert
c. Select the eraser and erase away

This gives you a perfect 1″ x 1″ round token image, which you can paste into a new image. Just make sure your new image has the same resolution as the original; for example, if you use the “US Letter (300 ppi)” template you’ll probably need to resize your image to 72ppi.

Also, to make curved text is a bit tricky, but basically:

Use the Path tool to drop a starting and ending path point. Then, still on the path tool, click and drag the middle of the path up to make a curve. Switch to the Text tool and type whatever text you want, then click the “Text Along Path” button on the tool window. This makes a *new path* that is the outline of your text, so you’ll need to make a new layer, pick Selection – From Path, then Edit – Fill with BG Color to get words. Once you do this you can delete your Text layer and two paths.

You can buy round 1″ labels instead of buying a hole punch. http://www.labelsbythesheet.com/ has 1″ white glossy labels for less than $1.00 a sheet. They also have sizes up to 4″. I use these to make my counters.

If you go to “Craft Parts” then look for “disc” at the bottom are 1/8″ thick x 3″, 4″, or 5″ diam wooden circles.

They’re not badly priced per unit, it’s shipping runs a little spendy, but since there is less demand for huge, colossal, and gargantuan creatures in general, buying 20 – 25 of each would probably set you up for quite a while, and only run you around $30 – 40$ including shipping.

Alternatively, most towns have at least one woodworking shop. If you find a smaller, privately owned, shop and asked really nicely, I’m sure most of them have large-size hole bits for their drills, and would take the five minutes it would take to punch out some wooden circles for you…as long as you provided the wood for them. I haven’t had the need yet to put a huge monster on the board (just went to Lowes last week to set up for large creatures), but when I do, I’m going to head to the Saturday Market and talk to some of the wood-workers there.

Thanks for the idea, I love the token’s I’ve made so far. I also took your advice of buying the small dollar tubes and they’re perfect for these tokens.

Only problem is that the group I’m with at home have tokens so I only get to test the bonus tokens. But, when I go back to school I’ll get to test them out as my primary markers. Thanks again for this tutorial and happy gaming.

I find with the washers, I can remove the pog easily and redo them just by soaking in some hot water for 5-10 min. Grabbed a pack of 30 at Lowes for $1.77 ..also, they sell 2″ washers for around $0.21 each for those Large creatures.

i have a question regarding TokenTool… is there a way to make the “ring” transparent, or invisible? Since the tokens are already small (1″), i want to get as much of the image on it as possible, and the ring (which does look great btw) does rob me of some of the image.

You can find up to 4″ wooden tokens at craft stores, but they start to get expensive at the larger sizes. A cheaper alternative is to use Bazzill chips (heavy cardboard coins you can find at a scrapbooking store) or cut your own. For cutting your own, I recommend the adjustable circle cutters sold at craft stores–they have a tiny razor blade which travels in a circle. It works well for paper, and will also cut cereal box-weight cardboard if you press firmly. Don’t try to use the kind of circle cutter pictured here for cardboard; I broke my Fiskars 1-inch punch doing that.

Well, I’m making some for Keep on the Shadowfell and they work perfectly, the only trouble is that I fon’t have a hole punch and can’t buy one, so must cut them out with scissors :S but well…
Great tutorial, really useful. I was in trouble with the minis, I’ve got some, but not too much ^^

Mod Podge otherwise known as decoupage glue would also work wonders and make them water resistant. It dries clear and is helluva strong adhesive. I’m definitely going to make some of these. They’re more personalized than minis for PCs!

I bought the exact same hole punch you have up there but mine is apparently defective. It leaves 4 very sizable spots where it doesn’t actually punch all the way through. That leaves me either trimming it the rest of the way with scissors or rotating it and trying again repeatedly.

Just a caveat emptor: I highly suggest shopping around to see if you can locate the Alea Tools products elsewhere. One of my items arrived damaged and I tried to get in touch with someone at Alea Tools. Despite repeated efforts for nearly a month to contact them using the e-mail addresses provided on their site (plus replying directly to the invoice e-mail) I never heard anything back. Once I looked around online I heard from other people that the company does not seem to reply to e-mails–ever. As neither their site nor their invoice included a phone number, I was (and am) at a dead end. Their products may be a good idea but if you run into a problem with missing or broken items, or any situation at all in which you need to reach someone at the company, best of luck. Remember: caveat emptor if you place an order with them.

I plan to make some of these when I can be bothered to go out for some washers and glossy card. I already drew up the tokens in fireworks. As I just wanted lettered tokens for more diversity (eg: a token with a B on it meens brute), I figured I’d draw them up myself. I did download TokenTool but wasn’t too fond of it so I just drew up some circles and downloaded a font that was both fantasy and readable. If you like I can send you the PNG file or JPEG of the tokens for you to upload here as a downloadable if you think they are good enough quality. Also could send you some finished shots of the tokens once they’re done. 🙂
Let me know, James.

If you have a round hole punch, do you really need to spend time on the computer making a round image? You could just as easily create a square image and punch out the round shape. It may waste a bit more ink, but it would seem to save a lot of effort.

Your blog is pretty cool to me and your topics are very relevant. I was browsing around and came across something you might find interesting. I was guilty of 3 of them with my sites. “99% of site managers are committing these 5 errors”. http://bit.ly/ts0ScL You will be suprised how fast they are to fix.

I’m planning to DM a custom campaign for the first time and I was glad to come across this tutorial. I never knew there was such a thing as a 1″ hole punch, and I didn’t look forward to cutting out every single token by hand.

A few suggestions:

(1) Skip the circle template business and just create a 4″x6″ grid, and paste in 1″ pics, to make 24 pics per grid. The hole punch will take care of the cropping. Save it as a *.jpg file and upload it to the photo site of your choice. Walgreens sells 4″x6″ prints for $0.12 apiece, which at 24 tokens per print means a HALF A CENT PER TOKEN. Can’t get much cheaper than that.

(2) To mount them, go to your local homebrew shop or search on Amazon for bottlecaps. I found a gross of them (144!) for $2.50 plus $5.49 shipping. Buy two sets and that nets you 288 for $10.49 which works out to roughly 3.6 cents per cap. They’re durable but lighter than metal washers, plus if you re-use your own they’re free (finally I know why I’ve been hoarding them all these years!). Similarly, milk caps are perfectly-sized for large creatures.

Total spent = 4 cents per token (4 and a half if you want double-sided) for regular-sized creatures. If you want to get fancy, you can get 1″ circle clear epoxy stickers to put on top, easily found with scrapbooking supplies or on Amazon; these might be useful for distinguishing PCs and elites. The only other things necessary are the punch and the glue.

I wanted to thank you for this awesome tutorial. I used the Gimp for an image tool and a local drugstore to print these babies out for me. I can comfortably fit 12 on a 4×6 sheet using the snap and ruler tools in Gimp. It costs me a little under twenty cents a sheet for printing.

After I initially commented I seem to have clicked on
the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and
now whenever a comment is added I receive 4 emails with the same comment.
Perhaps there is a means you are able to remove
me from that service? Thanks!

I like the idea of using washers as they would probably hold up longer but might be heavier to carry around but then you could make a “pouch” to put them in which would look cool.http://www.rippedsheets.com

Hey there, I have wondered about buying the software package DubTurbo Beatmaker and was hoping anybody could give me an actual real testimony of the program. Almost all the online resources that offer product evaluations at the moment are internet marketers selling the program therefore i don’t believe that the comments are trustworthy. Many thanks in advance for all information any individual can provide.

Thanks , I’ve just been looking for information approximately this subject for a long time and yours is the greatest I’ve discovered till now. However, what concerning the conclusion? Are you sure concerning the supply?

Hi there! I know this is somewhat off-topic but I needed to ask. Does operating a well-established website such as yours require a massive amount work? I am brand new to writing a blog but I do write in my journal everyday. I’d like to start a blog so I will be able to share my experience and feelings online. Please let me know if you have any kind of ideas or tips for new aspiring bloggers. Appreciate it!Moreno Valley Roof Contractors, 22440 Mountain View Rd., Moreno Valley, CA 92557 – (951) 999-4300

Hey man, great guide! I’ve done this using the wooden circles, and i even found some larger 2 inch ones for large creatures. My question though: How do you represent a Huge or bigger creature? I haven’t been able to find 3 inch disks.

Hi Chris – I played around with this idea (wrote a bit on my blog about it here http://nextcrazyventure.com/wp/blog/2013/02/19/tokens-1). If you use the washers What I came up with was using cardboard (but thinking something like balsa wood would look nicer) cut in the appropriate dimension. At the center I glued a bit of that flexible magnetic material you find everywhere (mine from some pizza adverts I had laying around so no cost). The washer sticks to the magnet and voila your creature has a bigger footprint. You could even do this with wooden tokens if you simply glue some of the magnetic material to the bottom of the wood token. The end result is usable for larger creatures and enlarged creatures, lightweight, and easy to carry around with your bag o’ tokens.

An impressive share! I have just forwarded this onto a co-worker who was conducting
a little research on this. And he in fact ordered
me breakfast due to the fact that I discovered it for him…
lol. So allow me to reword this…. Thanks for the meal!!
But yeah, thanx for spending some time to talk about this matter
here on your web site.

[…] battle if you’d like. The part that I loved the most though, was that if you happen to use tokens made with metal washers, these things are great. They fit perfectly on the magnet, and being metal, well, obviously that […]

[…] off. Thankfully, all that was left was making some mini’s for the PCs and baddies. I took the advice of The Newbie DM and printed out the pictures and adhered them to 1″ washers. A 30 pack at Lowes ran me less […]

[…] to be trying next is supplementing my existing minis collection with self-made tokens, based on a blog post by NewbieDM. I’ve already picked up the appropriate supplies. Coming soon: the results of my […]

[…] a minis collection, I got sick of carrying them around. So now I just make my own minis using this tutorial. You lose the fancy 3D-ness but gain customizability. I use the Alea Tools magnet circles instead […]

[…] for miniatures during your next gaming session. The site that inspired me to do this is Newbie DM and I encourage you to read the original blog post. It is a great resource. Read it, and you will […]

[…] NewbieDM tutorial: counters, tokens, or pogs (this is the one that appeared last year, shouldn’t be here on the list) NewbieDM tutorial: Printing battlemaps to a 1″ scale/ Song lyrics and your campaign Advice for new dm’s only Are you a new dm looking for players? Don’t make the pc’s ride the newbie railroad A system for playing dd with my kid […]

[…] about switching to homemade tokens for a lot of my stuff. NewbieDM has a great post about how to make your own, and the ability to easily store and transport them is appealing. Sure, these would never […]

[…] I’m pretty sure I’ll follow Ismael_DM’s suggestion in the comments of using the tutorial on Newbie DM’s blog to make flat tokens using metal washers. More on that as I actually give it a shot. (Thanks for […]

[…] a search for alternatives I rediscovered Newbie DM’s post on “minis” made from Gametable/MapTools type pogs, printed out and affixed to metal penny washers. I’ve found 25mm washers for £1.82 per […]

[…] on the dry erase mat and really didn’t want to fiddle with the tokens I had made using the famous washer system. It had been some time since then but I never really busted out the materials again. Didn’t […]

[…] keep a bunch of tokens, per Patrick’s Not Just a Token Gift article, which was modified from one Newbie DM did. Thanks Newbie DM! You really made my improv box with that article. The beautiful thing about […]

[…] I need miniatures I bring a box or two of tokens that I created myself using NewbieDM’s method and my templates. These really are awesome for running large combats with or for running convention […]

[…] Sheets – Did you know that I love tokens? I have loved tokens since before it was fashionable to love tokens. I’ve loved double sided,… But we’re not here to talk about that, we’re here to talk about the included tokens in […]

[…] that most craft stores put out. I was too cheap to buy one, but if you’re the type to make your own tokens on a regular basis, I would highly recommend such a tool to make token manufacture simpler. (Note: […]

[…] but it is sometimes nice to get an idea of layouts. To that end, we’ve used tokens, vis a vis Newbie DM’s article and Patrick’s article that built on Newbie DM’s original work. Here are the tokens that […]

[…] but it is sometimes nice to get an idea of layouts. To that end, we’ve used tokens, vis a vis Newbie DM’s article and Patrick’s article that built on Newbie DM’s original work. Here are the tokens that […]

[…] remember if it was The Tome Show or Dungeon Master Guys) I’d found when I heard about a do-it-yourself project for creating your own tokens for tabletop RPG from the Newbie DM. Like me, a lot of folks prefer miniatures but I could see the […]

[…] the battle field. Instead of miniatures, I elected to make my own using the information provided by NewbieDM and Kassoon. The miniature markers utilize metal washers, so Kassoon’s idea of creating […]

[…] but it is sometimes nice to get an idea of layouts. To that end, we’ve used tokens, vis a vis Newbie DM’s article and Patrick’s article that built on Newbie DM’s original work. Here are the tokens that […]

[…] keep a bunch of tokens, per Patrick’s Not Just a Token Gift article, which was modified from one Newbie DM did. Thanks Newbie DM! You really made my improv box with that article. The beautiful thing about […]

[…] tokens for our game. Since I’m on a budget I opted for the latter. I recalled reading a tutorial by Newbie DM several years back detailing how to make your own tokens. After a bit of research I […]

[…] simply small, circular pieces with pictures on them to represent whatever is on the map. You can craft these yourself easily, and cheaply. As far as maps are concerned, I highly suggest buying a mat and some water […]

[…] of requests I'm making this simple guide to creating roleplay tokens. This is my guide. There are other guides like it, but this one is mine. Quick note, you can always do this by buying a set of tokens, […]

[…] been looking at how I run my games lately. I’ve been thinking about minis, paper minis, and tokens, and what I want for my game and my table. Tomb of Annihilation has a SHIT LOAD of possible random […]